October 21, 1991: Apple launches its PowerBook 100 series. The lightweight laptops quickly become one of the most important tech gadgets of all time.
These devices will almost single-handedly turn notebook computers into mainstream technology. Apple’s subsequent success in this category — whether it’s the current MacBooks or even the rise of mobile devices like the iPhone — owes a huge debt to the PowerBook 100 series.
June 7, 1993: Apple debuts the PowerBook 180c, a solid upgrade that brings a world of dazzling colors to the company’s laptop line.
The 180c’s big improvement over the grayscale PowerBook 180, which launched the previous October, is its active-matrix, 256-color screen. Such a screen is something of a novelty for laptops in the early 1990s.
With Thunderbolt 4 connectivity becoming more and more common in new laptop computers, including various Macs, you may be in the market for a worthy docking station. After all, small, lightweight laptops don’t always have all the ports you need. So it’s a good thing StarTech.com recently released its TB4CDock for Mac and Windows.
The Thunderbolt 4 station bristles with the ports you need to turn your laptop into a desktop, or close to it.
The current MacBook Pro is the worst thing since unsliced bread — at least if you believe my colleague Charlie “glass is half empty” Sorrel. But while people might be happy to dump on Cupertino’s current laptop selection, Apple brought us some amazing laptops in its 40-plus year history.
Here are the inarguable top five Apple laptops of all time.
Apple’s current laptop lineup is the simplest it’s been in a while. It consists of the 13-inch MacBook Air, and two sizes of MacBook Pro, which are almost identical apart from size.
If you want a 15-inch Apple notebook, then the choice is easy. But if you want a 13-incher, which should you pick? That’s what we’ll look at today, pitching the 13-inch MacBook Air against the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Huawei is developing its own operating system that will power its smartphones and other devices if it cannot rely on Android.
Richard Yu, head of the company’s consumer division, has now confirmed the software could be ready in early 2020. Android and Windows remain its top preference for now, however.
In today’s edition of Deals & Steals, we found a brand-new 12-inch rose gold MacBook for $400 off. We also have great deals on a Logitech universal remote bundle, a surprisingly stylish router and a cheap smartphone.
The current ban on laptops and tablets in carry-on luggage from 10 different airports could be extended internationally, a new report claims.
The U.S. government has held high-level discussions with officials from the European Union, with both sides deciding “to intensify talks.” The U.S. is said to be more enthusiastic about the possible ban than their European counterparts.
The Trump administration won’t be expanding its ban on the use of laptops, tablets and other large electronic devices to flights entering the United States from European airports, after all.
U.S. and EU officials reportedly decided against a ban on laptops and tablets in cabin baggage on flights from Europe, although “other measures” designed to keep passengers safe are still being weighed up.
The Trump administration is reportedly considering expanding its ban on the use of laptops, tablets and other large electronic devices to flights entering the United States from European airports.
The ban is already in place for travelers flying from 10 Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Apple’s reputation as the world’s best laptop maker took a serious hit in 2016, due to the new MacBook Pro’s adoption of USB-C.
In the latest brand rankings by Laptop Magazine, Apple’s slipped five spots as Lenovo and Asus surged to the top of the pack with their affordable and dependable wares.
Check out the full rankings:
As per Steve Jobs’ much referenced “reality distortion field”, Apple seemingly isn’t subject to many of the rules which govern other companies.
As a tablet-fueled holiday price war is breaking out among laptops, Deutsche Bank has noted that Apple is staying out of it entirely — and the strategy seems to be paying off.
How crappy are Windows PCs these days? The most reliable, best performing, highly rated laptop for running Windows on is a frickin’ Mac: specifically, a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13. That’s the conclusion of a new report released by Soluto, purveyors of a cloud-based PC monitoring and management software suite, sampling data gathered for the first three months of 2013 from 150,000 portable PCs, and awarding them a score according to how many times programs on average crashed or hung, how long it took to boot up, how many background processes were running, and how many times it BSODed (or completely crashed).
As ZDNet’s Ed Bott points out, the laptops that were determined to be most reliable were the ones that ran clean installs of Windows, instead of bloatware-infected OEM installs. And surprise, every Mac running Boot Camp must use a clean install of Windows, making it the king.
Jeez, PC makers. This is just sad.
Source: Soluto
With Tuesday’s’s announcement of a 128GB iPad 4, Apple is clearly signaling that the iPad is not only suitable for serious work, but that it can be the primary machine for many users. Most commenters have fixated on fitting extra movies and other consumables into the extra 64GB of space, but they’re forgetting about work.
In fact, I’d say that the iPad With Retina Display, as Apple now insists on calling it, is the new desktop machine, and the iPad mini is the new laptop. Why? Let me explain:
MacRumors received several reports today from Apple customers who have gotten emails from Apple. In the emails, they were told that the Retina MacBook Pros they had purchased on launch day (through Apple’s enterprise site) have been delayed, in some cases by up to a month.
One such email is quoted below.
A gang of con men in Manchester, England, have managed to scam unsuspecting customers out of over £3,000 (approx. $4,700) since February by selling bottles of water, cans of Coke, and bags of potatoes which they claim to be iPhones and laptops. In some cases they are taking £1,400 (approx. $2,200) per transaction.
During last week’s earnings call Tim Cook was asked what he thought about Windows 8 being “optimized” for tablets. Cook humorously responded that, “anything can be forced to converge, but the problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day does not please the user. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.
Well, guess what, Timmy? A couple of genius engineers over at The Brydge went out and combined two of the greatest kitchen appliances of our time — the toaster and the fridge — and came up with the glory of The Froaster. Eat those words! Eat them!
Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal puts the enormous gains in the electric efficiency of computation (or how much power a computer draws) in perspective using the example of Apple’s new MacBook Air.
Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets. That is to say, you’d need 10,000 Air batteries to run our hypothetical machine for seven hours. There’s no way you’d fit a beast like that into a slim mailing envelope.
When Steve Jobs called the MacBook Air magical, this isn’t what he meant, but after reading this article, it’ll be hard to look at the wafer-thin ultrabook on my desk the same way ever again.
Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Air might look just like last years model, but don’t let that fool you the insides have been almost completely replaced. Powerful new processors and upgraded internal components make Apple’s powerful and ultra-portable notebook computer even better than last years model. I called it blazing fast last year, but this year I have to say it’s smoking fast. Its performance leaves some MacBook Pros in the dust.
I’ve spent two weeks with my new 13-inch MacBook Air putting it through all kinds of real world tests, using it daily for a variety of tasks like word processing, web surfing, image manipulation, and running various applications including Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and Mac OS X Lion virtualization.
I’d like to share with you what I experienced during the first 14 days I used this new 13-inch mid-2011 MacBook Air.
Still worried about MacDefender? That’s nothing: a new security vulnerability in MacBook batteries means that it’s possible that future hackers won’t just try to steal your credit card numbers, but might actually cause your computer to meltdown instead.
Today, Apple released new Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs with Thunderbolt ports, backlit keyboards and all-around upped specs. Any MacBook Air you get will, in all likelihood, be the best laptop you’ve ever owned, but how do you know which MacBook Air is right for you?
After nine months of using and loving our last-gen MacBook Airs, we know which one we’d recommend to most people: the 128GB 11-inch MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM. Here’s why.
Despite Apple being their number one customer, Samsung’s done a healthy trade in ripping-off Cupertino’s gadgets and selling their own, often patent infringing doppelgangers… and with their new Series 9 ultraportable, Samsung now has the MacBook Air square in their sights.
Even if Apple thought Antennagate was overblown, let’s face it: their last attempt to put the iPhone’s antenna into the exposed edges of the device didn’t work out so well, prompting a PR catastrophe so bad that Apple was actually forced to hold an emergency press conference… something they never do.
That in and of itself suggests pretty strongly that Apple’s going to try something new for the iPhone antenna in future handsets, and if a new patent is any indication, that new approach to hiding the iPhone’s antenna may be by hiding it under the iconic Apple logo.
A couple weeks ago, one of my friends brought me a new MacBook Air from the States, and as he delivered it to me, he — a die-hard Windows user — eloquently endorsed Apple’s sexy new, razor thin ultraportable by noting that as far as was concerned, “using this laptop is what living in the future feels like” and that “I’ll definitely buy one, because this computer will get you laid.”
He’s not an exception: I’ve turned more Windows-loving heads with the new MacBook Air than any other laptop I’ve ever owned. It looks like makers of Windows PCs have noticed the same thing, because Acer, Asus and Lenovo are all set to ape the MacBook Air’s incredible design.
Chipmaker AMD hasn’t been doing well lately. Last year, they chalked up a third quarter loss of nearly $128 million. This year was scarcely any better at $118 million. At least this quarter, though, they have an excuse: the iPad’s killing notebook sales, even according to their own CEO.
